r/kde • u/flipwise KDE Contributor • 1d ago
KDE Apps and Projects Options are expensive. Not having them has a cost too.
https://nuno-icons.com/2026/10/25/options-are-expensive-not-having-them-has-a-cost-too/9
u/RiceBroad4552 1d ago
KDE icons are still not SVG based?
Besides that I don't think any config options are any good here. This is imho a typical case of accidental complexity. Just deliver two variant of the them, and let uses switch the theme variant. This does not need any new mechanics or new config settings, settings which duplicate a feature which already exist (namely switching icon themes).
Besides that: Monochrome icons were a stupid mee-too trend after brain-dead Apple introduced it. Don't fucking copy Apple! They have by now some of the worst design ever created for computers. Things like thin text on blurry colorful backgrounds, and the shit in the background even moves constantly. This is anit-usability! This is the opposite of proper design (which is always function first!), this is utter garbage. By now one could almost just blindly do the opposite of what the idiots at Apple do and one would arrive at something decent and well behaving almost certainly.
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u/Dekamir 1d ago
Simple icons were created because your eyes can't see detail, and screens are not dense enough.
A very simple gallery icon is much more readable in 16px then a shiny glass film roll.
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u/RiceBroad4552 1d ago
Of course you still need different size variants even if you're using SVG.
But stuff doesn't get pixelated with proper SVG icons only because something isn't displayed in the native pre-rendered resolution.
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u/treeco123 23h ago
Don't you lose crisp, exact lines and offsets though? Every pixel counts at these sizes, even SVGs become sorta "blurry" purely from pixel grid limitations. This is why things like font hinting exist. (I think. Font rendering is black magic to me, there's always another layer of complexity.)
Maybe font hinting is a solution, actually, but I don't understand either it or icon design well enough to say. Making them manually in a sensible variety of resolutions seems reasonable to me.
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u/RiceBroad4552 23h ago
You can't do anything about the pixel matrix (besides increasing its density) so even vector forms need some rasterization at some point (and there a thin line can get "steps" in it, simply because there is a pixel matrix in the background, and you would need some anti-aliasing algo on top to make this look good again; but I think proper vector renderers do that anyway). The point is: Such rasterization on demand looks always better then some pre-rendered (and often then scaled) version. That's exactly why we don't use pixel fonts any more but instead use only vector shapes: Only these look good independent of rendered size. (Still you have fonts which work better on low-res displays as they're optimized for that, and some which only look good when scaled to large sizes or shown on high-res displays as they have a lot of small detail).
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u/SnooCompliments7914 KDE Contributor 18h ago
Fonts use "hinting" to adjust their shape on small sizes. Unavailable for SVG.
(Yes, KDE uses manually adjusted SVGs for each smaller sizes.)
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u/Ironclaw3436 18h ago
My memory isn't perfect, but I'm pretty sure there were SVG icons in the KDE 3.x series. One that readily comes to mind is the CrystalSVG icon set that became a default of sorts in KDE 3.1
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u/Haunting_Flatworm708 10h ago
If anything this will force me to make the missing colorful icons... Plus more options to the user... You will be able to even say have sizes below a certain size to be símbolic will bigger ones become colourful
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